Do you run inside a folder?

[yggdrasil]

I have run WHMCS since ages from a folder (not the root domain or a subdomain).

That means example.com/whmcs

And this is how many people installed and run WHMCS (at least from other sites I saw in the past). But when WHMCS introduced the new route/SEO path features it gave me troubles. I managed to restrict my .htaccess rules only to that folder (not above it) and I heavily customized them but still WHMCS never played well after those new SEO changes. Example, voting on a KB article routes incorrect (404) or some links in the cart like renew a domain also go to a non-existing path. Strangely, other links work fine, but some don't. The old URL and links still worked fine without issues, but the new format some parts don't work correctly. I run another CMS on the main domain that also routes through index.php and has its own .htaccess but that is completely separated to the rules in the folder. Now it seems with WHMCS 8 they are expanding these routes and I don't want to keep adding my custom PHP hooks and rules.

Long story short. Back then WHMCS support told me something I was shocked. They said the settings (I used the official .htaccess rules on my Apache server) don't work properly because they don't support WHMCS installation in a folder. Basically, they said to me WHMCS must be installed in the root domain or a subdomain and installing it on a folder is not supported.

I'm curious how much truth there is to that and how many of you are running inside a folder and if yes, do you have issues when turning the fully friendly URL's on in your installation.

I'm considering it moving to a subdomain and see if that fixes the issues, but it also means losing my ranking and having to rewrite tons of articles with hard coded links. I'm not even sure I believe that because if that was true, then all the links and routes would not work properly but was never my case. Only a 3 or 4 did not worked correctly, the rest did. And I could fix those manually because I have no access to the code and they removed the links from the template files. What I did to fix those 3 or 4 links was code a hook that detects the URL and then redirects to the proper page but as WHMCS keeps adding this stuff (and I have no way to actually edit or fix the links) I'm afraid version 8 will be a nightmare.

I'm curious if WHMCS is actually glitchy or does not work properly if run from a folder instead of a naked domain.

For my surprise, all the showcases and other sites posted on the community that do run WHMCS like me in a folder such as example.com/whmcs-installation have the old URL link structure. None of them are using the fully friendly URL settings. I assume its related to most of them having customized themes that don't play nice with that structure or they also have issues with the new URL format. I would really like to see some feedback here because the old URL's are on its way out. WHMCS will eventually remove them completely from the templates and files and it's only a question of time before you also are hit with the same issues.

Edited November 16, 2020 by yggdrasil

[steven99]

I have always ran WHMCS in a sub domain (clients.example.com) .   I like to have different scripts separate from each other for organization, security (each script runs in their own user), and issues with .htaccess as you described. 

[Kian]

12 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

I'm considering it moving to a subdomain and see if that fixes the issues, but it also means losing my ranking and having to rewrite tons of articles with hard coded links.

You don't have to lose rankings. Redirect 301 all contents to your new path. Next, find old links and replace them with new ones from phpMyAdmin. It takes time but this way you don't have to start from zero.

As for the rest, like I said tens of times in this community, SEO URL are a minor ranking factor. There's no point in putting so much effort into something that will never affect your rankings on Google. Especially due to all other limitations of WHMCS when it comes to SEO. Google will not rank you higher just because you're using a friendly-URL. Improvements are non-existent and I can speak from experience. I can even show charts 😛

[yggdrasil]

55 minutes ago, Kian said:

You don't have to lose rankings. Redirect 301 all contents to your new path. Next, find old links and replace them with new ones from phpMyAdmin. It takes time but this way you don't have to start from zero.

As for the rest, like I said tens of times in this community, SEO URL are a minor ranking factor. There's no point in putting so much effort into something that will never affect your rankings on Google. Especially due to all other limitations of WHMCS when it comes to SEO. Google will not rank you higher just because you're using a friendly-URL. Improvements are non-existent and I can speak from experience. I can even show charts 😛

Yes, I changed paths before and that is how I always redirect the old ones but it's still annoying finding links years later that still point to the old structure. Every time I changed a major path/route I have to change it in so many places and different systems that I cannot seriously remember all of them anymore.

[yggdrasil]

8 hours ago, steven99 said:

I have always ran WHMCS in a sub domain (clients.example.com) .   I like to have different scripts separate from each other for organization, security (each script runs in their own user), and issues with .htaccess as you described. 

Sure, it has the benefit that you can run it as a different account, or even better, you can put it on a different server for scaling and even more isolation and security in the future if required.

I always do this with different systems but with WHMCS is different because it's very integrated to the main site. Being one of the key features (billing, products, support) I don't really get any benefit in security while separating it since the main site shares database connections, files and I need to access config files from both places. While you can technically achieve the same by just copying files and applying the proper groups and permissions on different accounts/servers it's just more redundant code I would replicate. This makes perfect senses if you consider WHMCS as something separated from the rest of your main site and applications, but I don't have any other application running on the main site besides the core site. All other apps run on their own servers completely separated, the only thing that runs in the main domain is the customized CMS + WHMCS and they are heavily integrated which means there is no real security benefit to separate them. It would just make the integration harder and they would still share data between them. Therefore, technically I just run on it on the same folder domain. As for other apps they do run on their own subdomains not even on the same server but on different systems for security reasons.